


huron

by orphan_account



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - College/University, Established Relationship, Friendship, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-11-01 19:00:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17872976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: thank you to Bethan, my editor and good friend. Love always.





	huron

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to Bethan, my editor and good friend. Love always.

He’d visited his brothers in their college dorms (the elder generally under the influence of alcohol), but Adam’s defied Ronan’s expectations. As usual.

 

Ronan imagined a neatly made bed, tidy stacks of textbooks arranged on a dustless desk, black Composition Staples purchases and college-ruled, three subject notebooks with black Dixon Ticonderoga pencils in their spines.

 

Instead he was greeted by a generously shared dwelling.

 

Monmouth Manufacturing, or what it might have been without Adam’s stint in St. Agnes, corrugated his lungs. All that time he and Adam might have wasted on each other…

 

Paperback novels lay open on Adam’s unmade bed. Faded jeans, rolled up and hidden discreetely near a fishnet laundry bag, submerged Ronan in an ocean of memories. Typed papers, overflowing with frenzied paragraphs in their evenly spaced margins (Adam Parrish, Danforth, Specific Heat Capacity), spilled over one another across a closed Dell laptop (bought used).

 

Ronan remembered the first email sent from it at a godawful all-nighter hour that enabled him to write _Sleep, for the love of god, Parrish._ Adam had responded with _x)_.

 

On Adam’s bulletin board above his desk, Ronan read leaflets advertising charitable book drives at the local library, book talks with sci-fi authors, lectures given by historians on esoteric areas of study in the college’s exhibition hall. A note, written on faded mint paper and lined with silver in a neat hand, lured him forward: _Remember Mackinac. 10/30._

 

Something vibrated. Flinching, Ronan recognized the plain black phone tossed unthinkingly between the covers of a book entitled _Critical Theory._ He flicked through the annotated pages before reading the message that reappeared after a couple of minutes passed: _still up for a drive later?_

 

Ronan’s mouth hardened. He didn’t bother confirming the sender. Hadn’t he planned his schedule around this?

 

“Fuck,” Adam said, forgetting himself, reorienting his balance over the threshold of his dorm. “I didn’t expect you.”

 

Winded, Ronan managed a questioning exhalation. “Shit, Parrish, rub salt on the fucking wound.”

 

Adam grimaced. “I mean right now. I didn’t expect you _right--_ You know what I mean, Ronan.”

 

The old him would have dismissed this with a “Whatever,” but that didn’t work now. This collegiate Adam, though, was a stranger to him. All the nights foregone for writing, all of these outgoing endeavours embarked upon without Ronan, without Gansey, without the Adam Ronan dreamt up on lonesome nights.

 

And then there was the other bed, neatly made, a tidied desk, obnoxiously decorative in its attention to organization.

 

Ronan said, “Where’s your roommate?”

 

“Out. He’s never here.”

 

He was affronted by the repulsive rush of relief that charged through him, voltage crackling.

 

Adam sought it out: “If Derek and I were close, I would have let you in on it.”

 

“Fucking hoped so.”

 

Something like a tuneful windfall hushed through Adam’s lips as he deserted his safety-pinned shoulder bag, a single patch (Aglionby) sewn onto its struggling cloth strap. He shuddered, shaking himself from the clutches of his nauseatingly thick dark coat. Canada Goose. Ronan wondered how Adam secured the funds to buy himself such an unnecessarily expensive garment. Then he remembered Gansey had planned on sending Adam a care package. Trust him to outdo Ronan without so much as a kind warning.

 

“Hey.”

 

He stilled, allowing Adam to tentatively nuzzle against his forehead. Flexing the stillness into infinity, Ronan closed their mouths and eyes in a kiss.

 

Adam’s tongue found the roof of his mouth, Ronan’s arms found the enclosures of his ribcage under Adam’s beloved Coca Cola t-shirt, and they fell across the absent roommate’s bed.

 

-

 

“Does he sleep here?”

 

“Barely ever.”

 

“Thank fuck.”

 

-

 

Late night visitors to the hallway bathroom stared at Ronan with brazen curiosity, himself dangerous and alluring in equal measure with his undercut of luscious curls, a glittering nose ring smarting through his nostrils.

 

Glaring, the fluorescent shards of light sparing no one the artwork of his labored musculature, he returned to the bedroom, toothbrush in hand.

 

Adam slept, a patchwork quilt coated in pastoral winter vistas rising and falling with  his gentle breathing. Working through the aftermath of their lovemaking usually soothed the wearying loneliness from Ronan’s bones until, without warning, an ugly jealousy manifested in the warped hollow of his soul.

 

He said, “Weren’t you going on a drive?”

 

Adam spoke through his dreaming: “Please don’t wake me up for this.”

 

“Who the fuck doesn’t care about the crap on people’s phones now?”

 

“You,” Adam said, finally turning over, eyes narrowed. “Where’d you go?”

 

He caught himself before asking the same. A different boy (though equipped with the same kissable smattering of freckles, same elegant hinge of a jawbone, same crest of dusky hair over a dune-swept shore) warmed him in the night, through the hurt when morning came.

 

“That’s it.”

 

Sitting up in bed, Adam shoved the quilt (another dream gift) from his limbs. Hauling up his Levi’s, both knees worn to nothing, he jutted his chin at Ronan.

 

“Get your shirt. Too much time in here with your head.”

 

Ronan obliged, throwing on his dark tank and devoted leather bike jacket. “Where we headed?”

 

“Nearby lake. Bring your bag.” Adam smiled, a wicked mercy. “Doubt you’ll wanna come back.”

 

-

 

Adam brought provisions.

 

Weeks before Ronan’s visit, he had packed them in the trunk of his dented Subaru. He had meant to scout out the location of the lake with a friend the day Ronan arrived. Owen was the only friend with whom Adam had come close to revealing a secret shelter he shared with his boys, a ghost and a mirror.

 

He told Ronan about him on the drive, how Adam met him at an ecology fieldwork presentation, how they had gone on a road trip to Mackinac Island for Owen to part with the ashes of his eccentric aunt. She spent the last years of her life recording rambling monologues interspersed with nonsensical anecdotes and spiritual poetry before her heart seized up and she died at a one-story motel off the interstate outside of Detroit. Owen’s mother had gotten ahold of her ashes from her brother and stored them in the family Honda that had since become Owen’s and promptly forgot about them.

 

“That’s not fucking possible,” Ronan said.

 

Owen and Adam had set about rectifying this (possibly deliberate) oversight by spreading Aunt Janice’s ashes in her chosen body of water, Lake Huron.

 

Then the sea monster stopped them.

 

“Run that back.”

 

“You heard me right.”

 

“No, I fucking didn’t.”

 

Owen shattered the Grecian urn holding Aunt Janice’s ashes on the concrete lining a steel barrier over Lake Huron. From the smashing waves that sprayed them with chilling salt, a huge being rose to its hulking entirety, obscuring the sun in an ocean of damning nightfall. It spoke to them; Adam understood the toneless, ululating sound of one thousand angels echoing over the lake as speech. His heart, bypassing his ribs, splattered between his feet. Tentacles, strangely resembling a cephalopod’s adornments and also the beard of a generic white-robed God, flailed in a grotesque halo around its head. By this point, Adam had crushed Owen’s hand. Remarkably, he remained on the concrete, staring at the monster with the stupid, terrified determination found in those who sacrificed themselves to cosmic interworkings beyond their understanding. Owen had finally pulled him away.

 

They followed it.

 

-

 

More specifically, Adam could not stop thinking about the monster’s hulking mass, the atonal beauty of its deathless call, its tentacles masquerading as a face, oil spills for eyes.

 

For days afterward, he reserved himself a studying room in the adult wing of the library and researched folklore hailing from the Great Lakes, stories that captured freakish wonders borne from dark, and Lovecraft, the racist asshole. He read up on Leviathan, the biblical sea monster; the Kraken, borne of Scandinavian folklore, amounted to a giant squid; the Megalodon, a shark apparently caught on radar off the coast of Japan, bigger than seven buses. Adam dreaded any future dealings with the ocean.

 

He continued collaborating with Cabeswater. In his lessons with Persephone, they had not gone over the ramifications of summoning sea monsters; the prospect might have awed her, but Adam was filled with an uncommon desire to seek out that which burdened him most: a fear he might conquer reassured him more awaited vanquishing.

 

Besides, few anecdotes were more badass than unexpected asides about encounters with the stuff of a pirate’s nightmares.

 

Cabeswater encouraged him: revisiting the trees, conversing with them on the subject of this mystery, indulging in their sage reassurance that his monster was sure to reappear…

 

-

 

They arrived in a half-moon parking lot dedicated to campers. Adam unloaded their necessary provisions from the Subaru’s ample trunk: an electric blanket, an insulated tent, an electric lantern, two enormous pillows, Goodwill fleece blankets, crates of non-perishable snacks, a hot pot. His eyes alive with alarming confusion, Ronan assisted him in carrying their supplies across the parking lot. Wordlessly, he followed Adam to their chosen campground, a thicket nestled between shrubberies twisted in on themselves, meant for burrowing.

 

“Might as well fucking move in,” Ronan said, his words a halting interruption in the midst of this quiet. Adam twiddled an eyebrow that said, _You getting it now?_

 

_-_

 

They had not anticipated the cold.

 

Warming themselves on either side of the lantern, sparing each other the warmth of their bodies, mouths, aching sighs unspooled from searching tethers, they waited. There were no disparaging remarks, no pessimistic admittances of defeat; there was no longing to pick up their belongings and pack up the Subaru, repeating the surreal drive through eerily lonely intersections, passing closed bars, backwoods general stores, neglected Christmas wreaths, family-owned stores for fishing gear. Waiting brought them back to themselves; the effortless persuasion in the existence of the impossible, a hubristic belief, sustained them.

 

In the thoughtful silence, Adam heard Gansey saying, “Can you fathom what we’ve done?”

 

_Yes, and yes, and yes._

 

“Have you told him?” Ronan said.

 

“No.”

 

Ronan buried himself into him, enfolding Adam in a fortress of warmth.

 

“Why.”

 

Adam smiled to himself. “I’m selfish with you.”

 

A fruitless pursuit, carrying on the conversation. Ronan made love to him as an ageless omniscience told the journeying birds where to fly for the remainder of winter.

 

-

 

They lasted two days.

 

By the second day’s end, they had snarfed down their dwindling non-perishables out of boredom. Ronan, through the side of his mouth, suggested fucking Adam in a dubious position they had tried, once, in the Barns, similarly bored out of their sanity. Adam demurred.

 

“Well, I’ve got fuck all in the way of ideas,” Ronan said.

 

Adam’s mouth sank open in a way that scraped his heart. “Do you hear it?”

 

His voice sounded hallucinatory, hysterical in its reverence. Ronan recalled mystics, ascetics starved from society in favor of belief.

 

He gripped Adam’s hands, remembering where blood met blue veins.

 

“Don’t fucking lose me.”

 

“Ronan,” Adam said, alert, “go outside.”

 

Ronan kissed him. Then he stood as high as the tent allowed and crawled through the insulated flap.


End file.
